How to prepare for Fortuna, Warframe's stunning open-world update

Our guide will make sure that when Fortuna releases later this month, you'll be fully prepared.

In just a few weeks, Warframe's biggest update ever will launch. Called Fortuna, this free expansion will add an enormous open-world zone on Venus where players can skateboard, capture endangered animals, and, of course, kill lots of Corpus soldiers. Digital Extremes still hasn't revealed an exact launch date, but that shouldn't stop you from doing some light prep work ahead of time so that you can immediately jump in and have some fun. Keep in mind though that only the first item on this list is mandatory. You can just as easily jump into Fortuna without doing any prep work, you just might hit some annoying barriers now and again.

This guide assumes you're already pretty familiar with Warframe and have played a good deal of it. If you're brand new, be sure to check out our complete beginner's guide, which will walk you through everything you'll need to know to get playing. Just understand that Fortuna, like Warframe's first open-world zone the Plains of Eidolon, might not be that friendly to newcomers. That's okay though, because even if you're not doing 360 flips on Fortuna's cool hoverboards, Warframe is still damn fun.

Be sure to read the comments below this article, where helpful players have pitched in some great tips of their own!

1. Beginners only: Unlock Venus

This might seem painfully obvious for Warframe veterans, but if you are interested in jumping into Fortuna as a newer player, you'll need to first unlock the Venus Junction. Don't worry, you can do this within a few hours. The first thing you'll need to do is complete the missions on Earth that lead to the junction. Once you've unlocked the junction, you'll see that you need to complete a series of objectives before you can actually use it to travel to Venus. Fortunately, these are pretty easy and they kind of act like a guide to help familiarize you with Warframe's different features.

To complete the Vor's Prize quest, for example, you'll need to do a series of missions on Earth that are basically Warframe's intro sequence. The rest of the Venus Junction objectives requires finding, equipping, and upgrading mods—something you'll need to do to have a hope of surviving any mission in Warframe.

Once you've done this, you can travel to the Venus Junction and fight the guardian who protects it. This fight is easy and you should have no problem bringing the guardian down and unlocking Venus and its missions. When Fortuna launches later in November, you'll find a new mission on Venus where you can access it.

2. Farm Orokin Catalysts and Orokin Reactors

Once Fortuna launches, players will have access to all sorts of new toys to play with including customizable Kitgun secondary weapons and pet robot-things called Moas—not to mention the new Garuda warframe, who just wants to suck your blood. That's a lot of new toys to level up, and every decent Warframe player knows that gear is much more fun to play with when its mod capacity has been doubled using Orokin Catalysts and Reactors. With one of these installed, you can install a much wider range of powerful mods.

Finding them, however, is a major pain, because there are only a few ways to earn their blueprints and none are reliable. Here's a few things that reward Orokin Catalysts/Reactors:

Time-sensitive Alerts that pop up constantly throughout the day, which sometimes reward Catalysts/Reactors. Download one of the Warframe Alert tracker apps for iPhone or Android, which will notify you when Alerts start.

A more complete list can be found on the wiki, but the most reliable way to farm these is to simply buy them from the in-game store using Platinum, Warframe's premium currency. You can buy Platinum for real cash or you can sell items to other players in exchange for it. Check out our complete guide to trading if you're unfamiliar with Warframe's surprisingly robust player economy, and watch YouTuber Dadefuye's guide below for specific tips on how to farm Platinum.

3. Farm Forma

This one isn't as necessary because Forma is best spent on gear that you know you'll be using for a long, long time. Similar to Orokin Catalysts/Reactors, Forma gives you even more mod capacity but through a complicated process called Polarity. Using a Forma requires you to re-level gear, though, and the gains are small enough that you'd be forgiven for not using it on every piece of kit you intend to use while exploring Fortuna. Still, having a few extras might be nice, especially for the new Garuda warframe.

For the most part, Forma blueprints can be earned from the same activities that also reward Orokin Catalysts/Reactors, but there are additional sources too: Void Relics, Orokin Derelict Defense missions, and Arena Missions. You also have a chance to earn Forma from the music puzzle rooms sometimes found on Lua missions, and from rare Orokin storage containers found in missions that take place on the Orokin Derelict, Void, and Lua.

4. Boost your Mastery Rank

As YouTuber AGayGuyPlays helpfully points out, Fortuna will also add two new Syndicate factions to earn and spend reputation points with. Both the Solarus United and the Vent Kids (a gang of skateboarding youths) will require you to grind reputation to level them up and unlock cool items from their stores that also cost reputation points. But here's the thing, your Mastery Rank determines how much of that reputation you can earn per day, so leveling it up is obviously a good idea.

Now, Warframe veterans will probably have a Mastery Rank high enough that this doesn't matter, but if you're relatively new to the game and haven't reached MR10 or higher, make sure you're spending time leveling new equipment that in turn levels your overall Mastery Rank. Early on, you don't want to be hamstrung and artificially forced to wait an extra day because you hit your daily reputation cap too quickly.

5. Less important tasks

Assuming you're sitting pretty on a pile of Forma and Orokin Catalysts and Reactors, you can also spend some time amassing stockpiles of other resources that are sure to be helpful when exploring Fortuna. For one, you could spend time farming resources like Morphics, Neurodes, and Neural Senors—all of which are rare but necessary to craft Forma and Orokin Catalysts/Reactors.

Some players are also spending time grinding the Plains of Eidolon to earn standing with the Cetus faction to purchase items like advanced mining lasers and fishing gear. It hasn't been confirmed, but these players are hoping that these items will give them an edge while exploring Fortuna.

Lastly, it might also make sense to level up your weapon mods that increase damage dealt to the Corpus faction. Since Fortuna will be almost entirely dominated by Corpus enemies, it might make sense to make space for mods like Bane of Corpus, Cleanse Corpus, Expel Corpus, and Smite Corpus.

Steven enjoys nothing more than a long grind, which is precisely why his specialty is on investigative feature reporting on China's PC games scene, weird stories that upset his parents, and MMOs. He's Canadian but can't ice skate. Embarrassing.